Amazon is now the biggest employer of young disabled workers in Britain – and it happened almost by accident
Key Points
- Amazon is the UK's largest private-sector provider of supported internships, operating across 25 sites including fulfilment centres, transport stations and delivery stations.
- Almost 300 young people with learning disabilities and autism have started the programme since 2021.
- More than 80% move into permanent employment, and Amazon directly employs 74% of them.
- The national employment rate for adults with learning disabilities sits at around 5% to 6%.
- Amazon has committed to quadrupling the programme to more than 1,000 participants by 2030.
Amazon began running supported internships in the UK in 2021 in partnership with the charity DFN Project Search. Almost 300 young people have since completed the programme across 25 UK sites, making Amazon the largest private-sector provider of supported internships in the country.
Participants aged 18 to 25 with special educational needs and disabilities spend their final year of education inside an Amazon fulfilment centre, combining classroom study in English, maths and workplace skills with paid hands-on work.
Each participant works with a dedicated job coach who provides guidance and workplace mentoring throughout the placement.
More than 80% of graduates move into permanent employment, and Amazon employs 74% of them directly. Set against that, the national picture is stark: the employment rate for adults with learning disabilities in the UK is around 6%, a figure that has barely moved in a decade despite repeated government commitments to close the disability employment gap.
Amazon’s own materials put it more bluntly, noting that the vast majority of people with learning disabilities in the UK want to work and 95% are unemployed.
Supported internships are a statutory route in England, funded through education budgets and available to young people with an education, health and care plan. Take-up has historically been limited by employer willingness rather than by demand from participants or by funding.
Scaling to 1,000
In June, at its Delivering the Future event, Amazon set out plans to expand the programme substantially.
The company said it will quadruple the scheme to support more than 1,000 young people with learning disabilities and autism into employment by 2030, extending it to more than 40 sites. John Boumphrey, Amazon UK Country Manager, said of the expansion: “We’re scaling this because it works.”
The commitment sits inside a wider set of UK employment programmes.
Amazon has created more than 6,000 apprenticeships since 2013, with apprentices working in robotics, engineering and data science, and its JOBS Project with Barnardo’s has supported more than 750 care-experienced and economically inactive young people into work since 2021.
Across the company’s UK employability programmes over the past two years, more than 85% of participants progress into employment or education, generating £4 in social value for every £1 invested, according to Amazon’s own assessment.
The scale-up will test whether the conversion rate holds. Running 175 interns across 30 sites is a different operational problem from running four times that number, and the 74% direct-hire figure depends on Amazon having entry-level roles available at the sites where placements run – a variable the company controls, but one that automation across its fulfilment network makes less predictable.
Amazon has not published a site-by-site breakdown of where the additional placements will run, or the timetable for reaching more than 40 sites.
